The most entertaining Obama press conference in years

1. Taking questions

• President Obama hosted his final press conference of the year today.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• The biggest news of the conference was Obama chastising Sony for pulling The Interview.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

• Obama: "We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States."

• Sony exec Michael Lynton: Obama's "mistaken."

  [CNN / Frank Pallotta]

• Lynton also insisted Sony is serious about releasing The Interview — just not on Christmas.

• Obama also promised retaliation for North Korea's hacking of Sony, but realistically, there's not a whole lot he can do.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• It's possible — likely, even — the hack wasn't mainly motivated by The Interview.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• It was certainly the most entertaining press engagement Obama has had in a long time.

  [Washington Post / Chris Cillizza]

• One notable aspect of it: all eight reporters Obama called on were women.

  [Vox / Kelsey McKinney]

2. Misc. - policy and world

• Pakistan has responded to the Peshawar school massacre with strikes that have killed 62 militants, or so it claims.

  [NYT / Ismail Khan]

• Officials claim the US has killed about 1,000 ISIS fighters and a number of senior officials in air strikes.

  [The Guardian / Julian Borger]

• ISIS fighters' morale is apparently collapsing, with 400 reportedly arrested for failing to report for duty.

  [FT / Erika Solomon]

• An independent review says the Secret Service needs more staff with more training, and the White House needs a taller fence.

  [Yahoo! / Olivier Knox]

• The Fed's delaying the Volcker rule, one of the most important protections in Dodd-Frank.

  [New Republic / David Dayen]

3. Misc. - other

• Papers at a conference were sent through peer review twice as an experiment. Most papers that were accepted by one set of reviewers were rejected by the other set.

  [Marginal Revolution / Tyler Cowen]

• A harrowing, detailed account of the September disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in Iguala.

  [California Sunday Magazine / John Gibler]

• Serial reporter Sarah Koenig's phone interviews with Adnan Syed could have easily cost $2,500 due to the ridiculous price of prison phone calls.

  [Businessweek / Joshua Brustein]

• The potential downsides of compassion.

  [The Critique / Roger Crisp]

• Jay-Z and Beyoncé lost a bidding war for a Beverly Hills mansion to … the guy who wrote Minecraft.

  [The Verge / Ross Miller]

• The secret to making a song sound Christmas-y: a minor subdominant chord with an added 6th.

  [Slate / Adam Ragusea]

4. Verbatim

• "I was just threatened with eternal damnation over how someone’s website might come up in a Google search."

  [The Kernel / Aaron Sankin]

• "A recent landmark study … attributes one-fifth of America’s productivity and wage gains over the past 50 years to the improved allocation of talent."

  [Washington Post / Jim Tankersley]

• "Sweden’s liberal freedom-of-information laws offer easy access to personal information about nearly anyone, including people’s personal identity numbers, their addresses, even their taxable income."

  [Technology Review / Adrian Chen]

• "Unlike their US colleagues, UK police no longer push for confessions, which they consider inherently unreliable."

  [Aeon / Douglass Starr]

• "[Current Democratic Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's] position on school desegregation was more of a Southern Democrat, and it came pretty close to massive resistance."

  [William Freivogel to ProPublica / Nikole Hannah-Jones]

• "Uncertainty is the subtlest form of tyranny."

  [Slate / Stephen Tobolowsky]

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